Page Content (OCR)
282 Babylonian tablets naming Khedorla'omer, Ariokh, and Tidhal in a talc not unlike the biblical one. The discovery was announced in a lecture by Theophilus Pinches to the Victoria Institute, London, in 1897. Having exam- ined several tablets belonging to the Spartoli Collection in the Brit- ish Museum, he found that they described a war of wide-ranging magnitude, in which a king of Elam, named Kudur-laghamar, led an alliance of rulers that included one called Eri-aku and another named Tud-ghula—names that easily could have been transformed into Hebrew as Khedor-la'omer, Ariokh. and Tidhal. Accompa- nying his published lecture with a painstaking transcript of the cuneiform writing and a translation thereof. Pinches could confi- dently claim that the biblical tale had indeed been supported by an independent Mesopotamian source. With justified excitement the Assyriologists of that time agreed with Pinches's reading of the cuneiform names. The tablets indeed spoke of "Kudur-Laghamar, king of the land of Elam"—uncan- nily similar to the biblical "Khedorla'omer, king of Elam"; all scholars agreed that it was a perfect Elamite royal name, the prefix Kudur ("Servant") having been a component in the names of sev- eral Elamite kings, and Laghamar being the Elamite epithet-name for a certain deity. It was agreed that the second name, spelled Eri- e-a-ku in the Babylonian cuneiform script, stood for the original Sumerian ERLAKU, meaning "Servant of the god Aku," Aku being a variant of the name of Nannar/Sin. It is known from a num- ber of inscriptions that Elamite rulers of Larsa bore the name "Ser- vant of Sin," and there was therefore little difficulty in agreeing that the biblical Ellasar, the royal city of the king Ariokh, was in fact Larsa. There was also unanimous agreement among the schol- ars for accepting that the Babylonian text's Tud-ghula was the equivalent of the biblical "Tidhal, king of Go'im"; and_ they agreed that by Go'iim the Book of Genesis referred to the "nation- hordes" whom the cuneiform tablets listed as allies of Khedorla'omer. Here, then, was the missing proof—not only of the veracity of the Bible and of the existence of Abraham, but also of an interna- tional event in which he had been involved! But the excitement was not to last. "Unfortunately"—to use an expression of A. H. Sayce in an address to the Society of Biblical Archaeology eleven years later—a contemporary discovery, which should have upheld the one announced by Pinches, ended up side- tracking and even discrediting it. as THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN